An excavator has moved in on the oldest part of one of the oldest buildings in Trail. As of noon today, part of the roof and attic of Trail’s first hospital had been demolished. The building had been vacant for over 30 years.
The building at the corner of Helena and Cedar was erected for a Dr. Corsan in 1896. Newspaper proprietor and future MP Billy Esling bought it around 1916 and converted it into the Aldridge Hotel, which he named after smelter general manager Walter H. Aldridge.
Esling listed the hotel for sale or rent in 1918, but there were no immediate takers. He offered it to the City of Trail to use as a school or new city hall, but they didn’t take him up on it. Instead, during the Spanish flu epidemic, Esling allowed the building to be used as an auxiliary medical ward, known as the Aldridge hospital.
In 1922, Esling finally sold the building to Doctors Thom, Coghlin, and Ney, who converted the building into a clinic and nurses residence. They formed the Trail-Rossland Clinic, which was renamed the C.S. Williams Clinic in 1940. A multi-storey addition was built in 1949 (seen below), which is also being torn down. As its doctors retired, the clinic shrank and finally merged with Medical Associates Clinic in the mid-1990s.
The remaining doctors donated the property to Selkirk College, who planned to renovate it but it never happened. The college sold the property to a man who planned to turn it into residential units, but this plan fell through as well.
Now in the process of being leveled, the hospital-turned hotel-turned hospital again-turned clinic is possibly the second oldest building in Trail.
It is one of two buildings being torn down on the same block. The City of Trail, which acquired the building in a 2017 tax sale, awarded a demolition contract this past spring worth $1.75 million to Local Industrial from Genelle. In addition to removing the old clinic, they will demolish the former Liquidation World further down the block, which dates to 1917.
UPDATE: As of the afternoon of Aug. 16, the building was a pile of sticks, and gaping holes had been exposed in the the 1949 addition.
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